I know this is not the full review, but I really, really hope you've compared to the AMD Fusion APUs in that full article - in particular, the C-50 which was a brilliant netbook processor. Although it has proved increasingly difficult to find in systems, it's still my baseline when looking at netbooks for school use here, and I'd hope for Cedar Trail to at least match that level of CPU/GPU performance.Reply

For anyone who isn't a demented consumer. My netbook hasa full keyboard, HDMI, VGA and USB ports all without paying extra. It runs the full web, and does so on a decent screen size (1366x768) so I don't have to keep pinching and zooming all the time. It has a tonne more storage and can be upgraded if I need more. It can handle more than 4 or 5 websites being open at one time without having to reload from the server. It can handle multiple users giving each their own place to store their files and unique bookmarks or whatever stupid wallpaper they want. It's expandable to 3G by adding a dongle, I don't have to pay a huge sum extra for the privelege (granted a mifi would work with a tablet but how many dumb tablet purchasers are going to know that?).

I had a 7 inch android tablet (a rooted nook color in fact) and beyond casual use everything else was such a pain. Multitasking, copying and pasting, hoping a website would render correctly.

The advantages a tablet would have I would say would be the battery life and maybe the ease of installing and finding software, but only by a nose. The rest of the benefits I listed put the netbook ahead and either cheaper or around the same price.

The magpies out there buying iPads are the same ones who probably eat with their hands because they aren't so great at mastering tools.Reply

I'm still rocking an Asus 1000H after 3 years it's still working flawlessly.Does the job what I expect from it. Put an SSD in that thing and I think it would be a very nice cheap system.

I wonder how this one or other netbooks (amd and intel based) do gaming and light workloads. With gaming I mean OLDER games, return to castle wolfenstein, dosbox, wolfenstein enemy territory, painkiller etc etc.Could care less about 1080p video but it's nice to have.Reply

my $200 C-60 AO722 platform still wins, Come on Intel. Brazos is over a year old and you still have nothing to counter the bottom end of the market. Lucky for Intel, Wichita and Krishna were canceled, I expect less than 5% gain with Brazos 2.0, so Intel may yet catch up.Reply

But yes, for $330 I'd say the AO722 is the better choice over anything with Cedar Trail. You'll give up some battery life and build quality compared to the 1025C, but you get 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD, better GPU, and roughly equivalent CPU. I think the AO722 partially just feels faster because it has 2GB RAM.Reply

It's not a matter of "all they can do" -- look at Core 2, Arrandale, Sandy Bridge, and soon Ivy Bridge. It's more a matter of "this is all Intel is willing to do for the sub-$50 CPU/SoC market". They're so afraid of cannibalizing sales of higher end chips that they refuse to release a real competitor to ARM. If Intel really wanted to make an amazing ARM competitor, they could, and we might see that at some point. The problem is that ARM SoCs like Tegra 3 and Krait sell for around $25, maybe $40 at most. Intel wants that 60%+ profit margin, and even they can't make an SoC that outdoes ARM for a cost of $15 to $25 per chip. Eventually, ARM chips will force Intel to do more for less...or possibly we'll see ARM chips that do more and cost more. A5X certainly isn't all that inexpensive I'd wager.Reply